Reclaiming the Ghosts of Trauma’s Past: Witnessing and Testimony as Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

This chapter considers Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) in the context of trauma studies. It argues that Ward’s novel depicts an aggregation of personal, collective, and generational traumas, occurring at metaphorical, ghostly, and unconscious levels. Ward’s novel shows just how pervasive generational trauma can be within one family and, by extension, within the Black community. This chapter analyses Ward’s novel to explore testimony and witnessing, as well as historical and recurring traumatic experiences such as slavery, police brutality, and wrongful imprisonment. It argues that examining the representation of overlaps in traumatic experiences between Black men, women, and children can advance the study of African American literary trauma studies, as well as demonstrate how other forms of trauma such as racism and incarceration stem from white supremacy. Drawing on concepts of witnessing and testimony theorized in Felman and Laub’s Testimony (1992) it seeks to bridge the gap between Eurocentric trauma theories and more inclusive and agile formations. Given the intersectional impacts of trauma in society, African American literature foregrounds portrayals of traumatic experience from marginalised communities. Ward’s depictions of trauma, filtered through a mother, her child, and a ghost, provide potent angles for unraveling such traumatic experiences.